It was 17 years in the past on Sunday {that a} 25-year-old man known as Jawed Karim uploaded the primary video to YouTube, kickstarting a service that went on to turn out to be the go-to hub for video streaming and giving anybody with a digicam and a good suggestion the prospect to make a dwelling out of their very own content material.
The primary video was, it needs to be mentioned, nothing to put in writing residence about. The low-res, 19-second clip (under), known as Me on the zoo, options YouTube co-founder Karim at San Diego Zoo, helpfully stating that elephants have remarkably lengthy trunks.
Like most movies that landed on the streaming web site in these early days, the clip lacks the extremely produced touches that function so closely in a lot of the content material that fills the platform as we speak.
“All proper, so right here we’re in entrance of the elephants,” Karim says to the digicam on YouTube’s first-ever video. “The cool factor about these guys is that they’ve actually, actually, actually lengthy trunks, and that’s cool, and that’s just about all there may be to say.”
In fact, when he recorded and uploaded the clip, Karim had know concept that YouTube would go on to turn out to be the phenomenon that it’s as we speak. Nor that his video would rack up a whole bunch of tens of millions of views within the years that adopted.
A month after Karim’s video hit the location in April 2005, YouTube launched a public beta of the service earlier than an official launch in November of that yr. At across the identical time, Karim left YouTube to review for a masters diploma in pc science at Stanford College, however obtained shares price tens of tens of millions of {dollars} when Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. Karim went on to co-found a enterprise fund known as Youniversity Ventures (now YVentures), with Airbnb and Reddit amongst these benefiting from investments.
The creator of YouTube’s first video sometimes edits the clip’s description to specific his opinion if the corporate makes a change to the platform that he doesn’t like. Final yr, for instance, Karim criticized YouTube’s elimination of public dislike counts.
As of April 2022, the elephant clip has been considered greater than 228 million instances and obtained greater than 11 million feedback. A current one mentioned: “Let’s be trustworthy, we’re all going to indicate our kids this video in the future.”
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